Paramount Wants To Make A Bunch Of Paranormal Activitys

I bet it feels like winning Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? whenever a studio throws a couple bucks in the ring for a movie like Paranormal Activity and ends up making more on it than they do on some of their huge blockbusters. $15,000. You can’t even buy a decent car for that. You can’t even pay for George Clooney’s assistant with that. That’s probably smaller than a studio’s annual toilet paper budget.

So it makes sense that Paramount has decided to try and recreate the monstrous success they’ve had with Paranormal Activity. According to Variety, Paramount has decided to start a new initiative that would have the studio spending $1,000,000 annually on “micro-budget” films. The studio plans to start production on 10-20 projects by the end of next year, all of which will have budgets of $100,000 or less.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to see a new trend of small handheld camera movies being released like crazy (although it could). There’s actually no guarantee that the movies from this project will be released theatrically. The studio is claiming that the project will be used as a means of discovering new talent as well as commissioning established filmmakers to make small budget films.

This doesn’t seem like a bad idea at all. Sure, I imagine it was conceived with greedy intentions due to the clean $100,000,000 that Paranormal Activity made for Paramount, but at the same time, I’m on board for any sort of project that will allow new directors and writers to be discovered. And if this is what it takes. I’m in.